Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

Lee Boot (00:00): So where to start with this, you're looking at a 4 x 7 foot painting that is kind of a painted diagram about culture, and it's part of a project called Who We Am. And this project comes out of what I had been learning in my first several years of research about human behavior because, you know, the health related projects and education project, uh, related projects that we were doing all were kind of aimed at changing people's beliefs, attitudes and intentions that led to behaviors. You know, I know that sounds really awful to manipulate people's behaviors, but um, the health community does it all the time. Um, so do educators and so does advertising. So using media to shift behaviors, even if it's only a film to get you to think more about any issue is actually quite normal, even though in the art world it sounds a little strange.

(01:09): Anyway who we am is my way of saying this is kind of who we are as a group, but it's also, this is through a lens of me. So I wanted to make sure that everybody understood that. I'm kind of saying, you know, this is all biased in a way, but our lab started interviewing people almost at random in 2010. In fact, at random we hired a producer to pick random people in Baltimore and we would just go and ask them, you know, what's it like being you living here? And really it was almost an unstructured interview and it was fascinating. One of the reasons we did this is typically research labs at universities are not very connected to the communities that live around them or even to any population that they serve is just, you know, not, not a thing with research a lot to get out in the community and talk to people.

(02:08): We wanted to change that. We really were very inspired by other researchers who were starting to do that, specifically at the state at the City University of New York. CUNY, a wonderful lab run by then, Michelle Fine, doing this fabulous community-based work called Participatory Action Research, blah, blah, blah. A lot of stuff you might not care about. So, so why a painting? Well, we were doing these interviews and I just started painting about this idea of culture. You know, what the narratives that unite us all. At that time, people weren't talking so much about culture the way they do now, you know, now you go to a, a bookstore or online, and every other business book is half about culture. Everybody understands culture change now.

Lee Boot (02:58): Ten years ago, 12 years ago, that was not the case. It was a very strange thing to be talking about culture. People wondered why you were even thinking about it. So I needed to really kind of meditate on that issue. So I did what would turn out to be four sets of 28 panels sort of four paintings about this issue. And we also made films about this issue. So again, if you follow the yarn up over your heads to the to one of the monitors, I guess it's the fourth one in the group, you'll be able to see, uh, a film about the importance of culture, really thinking about culture. This particular painting is an acrylic painting that is also collage, collaged, inkjet prints of photographs on wood panels. So I'm still using panels, lots of them to move them around while I paint and shift the image that way.

Find a complete transcript for this stop on Smartify.